Relevant Film Clips

In spite of its cruelly efficient minefield, leaving every one of the cast of characters in Jacques Demy’s film, The Young Girls of Rochefort, maimed for life, it delivers a haunting joy.

There Gene Kelly speaks of being "dehumanized" by his choices. But his "Andy’s" sickly professionalism cannot prevent us delighting in his 1940’s Technicolor attire and the way he scoots it about in dazzling, breezy sunlight amidst structures and passers-by of such chromatic radiance as to bring, flooding back, one’s earliest excitement by life.

The film clips shown here, from the all-important Kiss Me Deadly and its sidekick, Fred Astaire (as seen by Paul Auster), to tributes by Demy, Twyla Tharp and Iggy Pop, all offer a taste of delicious freedom amidst yawning pitfalls.

(It may be useful to know that in the first clip from Peau d'Ane, Catherine Deneuve's Donkey Skin [peau d'ane] attire derives from her character's having had to match wits with a widower-King [her father] intent on marrying her as directed by his dying wife [also played be Deneuve] to settle for only a beauty like her. In the excerpt, the daughter and her mother as remembered [and also perhaps her own life before being exiled], recreate golden [musical] moments together, with a view to future happiness in love.

In the second clip from Peau d’Ane, matrimonial dealers close in for the kill, and the casualty of love sings the following song, whose timbre somewhat belies its stressful lyrics.

    I carry love around my neck,
    My heart is crazy,
    For your embrace will bring torture
    To my serene soul.
    Like a scarf of coarse wool,
    Love envelops
    And then forms knots.
    Love, love
    Has driven me crazy.

    Love often makes great trouble.
    At the moment of my flowering,
    It tears and devours me.
    All lovers must suffer.
    Who hasn't had to let it go?
    Love, love is not kind.

    In a heart once light
    And now empty,
    At the slightest mishap,
    Love unravels.
    The claw of memory
    Snares it.
    Love kills itself with time.

    Love, love
    I love you so much.
    Love, love
    I love you not.

    (Amour, amour
    Je t’aime tant
    Amour, amour
    Je t’aime pas.)
 

In the clip from Twyla Tharp's In the Upper Room, there is taking up a challenge of sorts posed by Auster's In the Country of Last Things. The latter depicts a place locked and rotting in the meanness of pedestrian, fascistic motives. One of the options left to the inhabitants is to join a suicide jogging club, where the point is to run yourself to death. The protagonist is a woman of corrosive ego among whose adventures is to hurl herself through the window  of an upstairs room of a vivisection lab, having been tricked into going there by the promise of new shoes. She forms a brief romantic alliance with another woman and they, with men friends, plan an abortive escape from the dead world. Tharp and composer, Philip Glass, lighten up this death march by providing an overtone of John Ford-like excitement for the noirish catastrophe.)

There is another indispensable distillation of the noir's sensual fatedness, the exquisite peaen to vicissitudes of carnal love in the oppressive context of 1962 Hong Kong, in Wong Kar-Wai's film, In the Mood for Love, where the two lovers in loveless marriages touch upon but do not savor the historical treasures of Pandora's Box. Here the musical aura, first by the appositely suave and incisive, Nat King Cole, then by Shigeru Umebayashi, Kar-Wai's version of Michel Legrand (at least at this moment), presses the tentativeness into the regions of daring at stake.

The final clip comprises the pivotal scene of David Lynch's quintessential noir, Mulholland Drive (2001), wherein the two women in the audience are overcome by a great performance of Roy Orbison's "Crying," by the amazing Rebekah Del Rio. As such, their hard-won poise and maturity of affection begin to elude them, their reckoning with Pandora's Box begins a punishing chapter.

Kiss Me Deadly

The Gay Divorcee

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort) dir. Jacques Demy

Peau d'Ane (Donkey Skin) dir. Jacques Demy

Peau d'Ane "Amour, Amour"

In the Upper Room choreographer Twyla Tharp

Beside You Iggy Pop

Quizas: In the Mood for Love

best part of "in the mood for love"

Llorando